The idea of what determines success varies within a person. One might say that wealth and power correlate with success. In reality, a complex array of factors determines the success of a person. In Gladwell’s novel, The Outliers, he critiques many examples of successful and unsuccessful stories. In the stories, he explains the main factors of success, or the “recipe”. For Gladwell, he describes the “recipe” of success to include luck, practice, and opportunity.
People in our world become successful through luck and chance. The decision between success and failure cannot be determined due to this factor. Gladwell composes a few examples on how people succeed because of luck. In the novel, Gladwell told the story about Canadian hockey players
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The novel consists of many examples of opportunity. One main example Gladwell explains was the comparison of Christopher Langen and Robert Oppenheimer. For Mr. Langen, he failed to succeed in his life due to not turning in financial aid to his college. Gladwell describes Langen’s failure to take a successful opportunity, “As a child, he had dreamt of becoming an academic. He should have gotten a PhD; universities are institutions structured, in large part, for people with his kind of deep intellectual interests and curiosity” (Gladwell 95). Langen had the choice to continue his education with the intelligence he acquired. In comparison, Robert Oppenheimer chose the opportunity to continue working in the scientific field after attempted murder. A partner of Oppenheimer remarked that he “could begin to come to grips with chemical, metallurgical, engineering and ordnance problems that had so far received no consideration" (Gladwell 100). After attempted murder of his tutor, Oppenheimer still possessed the opportunity to work with scientists on the Manhattan Project. Both examples show the power of having a certain opportunity at the right